Why America Is A Lousy Puppeteer

Nuri al-Maliki is out. Hamid Karzai is on his way out. And it’s long past time for the United States to get out—of the puppet business, that is. The lesson of the last 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan—and of the previous half-century or so in other countries America has dabbled in – is that we’re just not very good at propping up the right people in power. And we never will be.

Following Maliki’s decision to finally step down as Iraqi prime minister under pressure this week, giving way to Haider al-Abadi—a move the United States supported—we should face the fact that the failures of both the Iraqi and Afghan leaders to establish stable regimes, or to provide security and end the internal fighting that has torn apart both nations, are only the latest sad chapters in this long history.

It’s no secret that since World War II, from Vietnam to Iran to Nicaragua, the United States has played a role, overtly or covertly, in establishing many governments headed by handpicked rulers. The rationale usually has been based on oversimplified bipolar worldviews, outdated theories of modernization and a paternalistic racism. American policymakers, seeing non-Western Europeans as politically immature and particularly vulnerable to radical political ideas, believed that the United States needed to establish and support proper rulers who would help their countries establish Western economic institutions and practices that would allow for the development of more “mature” societies. Non-democratic methods and leaders became seen as necessary antidotes to radical political movements, social disorder and economic nationalism—even as the United States convinced itself that it was promoting the rise of liberal democracies. More often than not, these efforts have failed miserably.

There are a variety of reasons for this. While the United States has the power to overthrow governments and prop up leaders, it cannot install political legitimacy along with power. But that lesson is never learned in Washington, and previous failures are dismissed as stemming from their shortcomings or our lack of will.

Take Vietnam. In 1954, in the wake of the French defeat, the United States blocked the implementation of the Geneva Accords and helped install Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of a new nation of South Vietnam. The logic was that the French failed because they were a declining power tainted by colonialism, while the United States had the resources, the will and the means to create a new country from scratch. By 1963, tired of Diem’s corruption and incompetence, the Kennedy administration supported a coup that brought the military to power. The problem was not American policy or goals, officials believed, but Diem’s inability to carry out the necessary policies and prosecute the war against the communist-led National Liberation Front. But the various generals who held power in Saigon had no greater success despite ever-increasing numbers of American resources, advisers and troops. Once the U.S. military shield was withdrawn, the shortcomings and lack of legitimacy of South Vietnam’s government led to its quick collapse under attack from North Vietnam and its guerrilla allies.

American leaders saw the failure of the South Vietnamese, or the downfall of the shah in Iran or the defeat of Somoza by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as the shortcomings of individual leaders because U.S. policymakers lacked any real knowledge of these nations’ histories, cultures, societies, political divisions and desires of the populations. Yet that limited knowledge of local conditions has rarely stopped administrations from intervening if they believe American national security or vital interests are at stake. Instead, policymakers since World War II have assumed that American values are universal, and that all people desire to have the same political structures and institutions that exist in the United States. Moreover, they believe that World War II demonstrated that American power is benign and that people in other countries understand that and welcome U.S. assistance and guidance. It follows that those who oppose the United States only have malevolent intent and must be resisted or defeated.

And then we find ourselves in a Catch-22 situation. Leaders that Washington backs because they promise stability, opposition to communism or terrorism and support of American foreign and economic policies are invariably seen as the creation of the United States. This undercuts their credibility, power and ability to rule. For years, the United States saw the shah of Iran, installed in power in a 1953 coup, as an enormous success, his White Revolution a model of modernization, and his country, in the words of President Jimmy Carter, as “an island of stability” in an area of turmoil, only to watch him driven into exile two years later. The same pattern has held everywhere from South Vietnam to Nicaragua, and then to Afghanistan and Iraq today: As these regimes begin to wobble, they rely more on the United States for military support, financial assistance and guidance. But the more aid they get from Washington, the more they look like puppets of a foreign power and begin to wobble even more.

At the same time, American officials grow frustrated with these regimes when they do not seem to implement change and reform fast or effectively enough, or carry out military operations successfully, to meet the challenges they face and defeat their opponents. Even more troubling from Washington’s perspective, instead of providing an interregnum of stability for a democratic government to emerge, the governments pursue their own goals and agendas—often bashing the United States to shore up their domestic political credibility even as they eagerly take American cash.

The United States has always had far less leverage with such governments than American leaders believed, and always becomes captive to the personal agendas of the leaders Washington backs. Only after years of support does it become apparent to U.S. officials that these leaders are using the United States for their own purposes—say, to eliminate their rivals—and then it is usually too late to change course.

The outcome is that a policy designed to modernize and Westernize countries instead only increases instability and unrest, leading to political polarization and anti-American sentiment. This is what the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s termed “blowback,” the unintended political consequences that result when the United States shores up unpopular and repressive regimes that help foster and fuel radical nationalist movements, and bring to power the exact forms of government the United States ostensibly seeks to prevent.

Iraq offers a powerful example. The original expectation that the United States would be welcomed as liberators, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would bring forth a largely peaceful, functioning society, were widely off the mark. When chaos emerged, American troops found themselves forced to try and establish order while also combating an emerging insurgency. The government created by the United States had all the trappings of democracy, but none of its practices. The Iraqi leaders who emerged to wield real power weren’t the suave, English speaking former exiles—they were the hard men, like Maliki, who fed off the country’s pathologies. And when the Americans finally gave up and removed their last combat troops, old resentments and conflicts reappeared, only worse than before—the case of the brutal, genocidally minded Islamic State being a particularly terrifying example.

Now that Iraq has a new leader who is said to be an amiable technocrat without Maliki’s overriding partisan agenda, can the United States escape its past as a poor puppeteer? Can Washington find a way to help Abadi rather than hinder him, empowering his government to take on the Islamic State without seeming to dictate its choices ? The Obama administration says it supports Abadi because it wants to see the democratic process upheld, and there is nothing wrong with this position.There’s no reason to think the Obama administration, no matter how many hundreds of advisers it sends or airstrikes it launches, will have any more success than the Bush administration did in stabilizing Iraq, because the underlying problem remains: It’s almost impossible to get a foreign leader to do what is best for you, rather than what he believes is best for him, no matter how much money you throw his way or how hard you twist his arm.

The United States can still play a positive role, but instead of the business of building puppets, we should be more in the business of cultivation—helping good leaders to grow. Success in Iraq or Afghanistan can only come if an indigenous force and leader emerges with local support, and then only if the United States doesn’t demand that they reflect the will of Washington and the goals of the United States in all of their actions and policies. This isn’t easy, though Washington has made a start in recent years by consistently supporting elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Going forward, the United States will have to demonstrate greater support for true self-determination in countries and a more patience with divergent approaches to problems than it has historically shown. The White House, State Department and Pentagon are not exactly bastions of creative thinking—and Washington is a notoriously impatient place.

In the case of Iraq’s new leader, Abadi, all we can do is try to encourage him to create a government that is more inclusive of diverse elements, respects the needs of different groups and does not use power to settle old political scores. Once shared interests and goals are identified, American aid can be used to encourage and support those efforts and to help rebuild Iraqi civil society as soon as stability is established. But that would mean acting more as an ally than an inept puppet-master.